Monday, June 9, 2014

From within- part I

A reader asked me what I consider to be a vital question today. I'm going to take the liberty of quoting his email directly, with some light edits:

Can you tell me a bit about valuation of the work? In my more conscious moments I value my evolution and esotericism more than anything else, and I feel it. At other times, I remember it has more value than what I have accomplished in sensory things with money ,women, competition in this small thing, that small thing; but it's as if it were a fog of a feeling.

How do you or what do you have or think or have developed to even further distinguish or strengthen that feeling/valuation/faith in the things that really matter?

Here is exactly what I replied:Develop an inner sensation of Being. This is the only correct answer.

You will need to work directly with someone on this to gain better experience.

My wife and I got to discussing this over lunch; and later, my correspondent asked a few more questions. I'm going to try to encapsulate the various points I made during these two discussions.

The inner sensation of being is an organic experience; not a mental one. There is a much finer energy that can always fill the body, all the time, and constantly flow into one. It doesn't necessarily flow in through a hole in the top of the head – though yoga schools would love to believe that is true. It flows from a higher level that already penetrates everything that there is, and it penetrates everything that is from within, that is, not from one direction or another, not from above or below or behind or in front, but from within.

That is to say, the finer energy that penetrates reality blossoms forth from within each point of existence, from within each atom or each molecule. This means that an inner energy does not flow in from a direction, except that it flows in from within. So in a certain sense, the entire body and all of its cells are already where the energy comes from, but it flows into them from within.

This may seem difficult to understand. We are accustomed to thinking that a river flows from here and goes to there; but nothing in terms of metaphysics works that way. Here and there are the same place; both are within God, but in our case here does not know that there exists. When Gertrude Stein said "there is no there there," she meant, in a certain way, that what is not there is the sensation of heaven. Of course she meant it differently, but we will appropriate her words without shame.

Heaven is already within; and this is exactly what Christ meant when he said the Kingdom of Heaven is within. But the kingdom of heaven has to be received; and it is received from within, where it is born within. These words, of course, are probably in many ways different — or at least appear to be different — from what Jeanne de Salzmann said on the matter, but we actually mean exactly the same thing, as does Meister Eckhart. In the end, there can be no disagreement on this question of the sensation of God, or heaven. It comes from within; it is the result of the contact of the intellect with God, which then flows into the soul and causes the soul to become alive within a person.

This sensation of Being which is congruent with heaven, and constitutes, in actual fact, a touch from God's hand, is called Presence; and it is called the Holy Spirit, Prana, and so on. Yet it is almost always just talked about. Its permanent arrival is a most unusual event, and few, if any, will become open enough to discover the exact meaning of the question. In a sense, this is not so important, because the search for the exact meaning of the question is what revitalizes and motivates a life; and even a taste of the organic sense of being is so much sweeter than all the honey in the world that it turns a man's face forever towards God; and that is what is important, to be turned in the right direction. Anyone who is turned in the right direction will eventually reach the destination; it is being turned the wrong way that is dangerous, and we live on a planet where all of the forces around us conspire to try and turn us the wrong way, face first into the material, where we will swallow everything coarse and believe in it.

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Recommendations and current reading list

Lee's current reading list (all recommended)

The Iceberg- Marion Coutts. This extraordinary book deserves to be read by every individual engaged in an inner search. The questions it raises about life, death, and relationship are framed by the authors responsibilities to her very young child and her dying husband. This is a book about real work in life, not esoteric theory.

Far From The Tree: Andrew Solomon. Parents, Children and the Search for Identity. Highly recommended.

Inner Yoga, Sri Anirvan—This extraordinary book is essential reading for any serious student of Gurdjieff or Yoga practice. Written at a level of both practical and philosophical discourse well above other contemporary work, Anirvan investigates the deep roots of Yoga practice, theory, and philosophy in a deeply sensitive series of insights. Of particular interest is the extraordinary and challenging piece on Buddhi and Buddhiyoga, which examines the questions of practice, life, and death with an acuity rarely encountered in other work of this nature.

Divine Love and Wisdom, Emmanuel Swedenborg. Swedenborg gives us a detailed report on Reality as received from higher sources, reflecting many Truths one would be wise to study carefully. Readers will be astounded by the extraordinary degree of correlation between Swedenborg and Ibn 'Arabi. Many fundamental principles introduced by Gurdjieff are also expounded on in fascinating detail by Swedenborg. All of Swedenborg's works are well worth reading.

The Divine Governance of the Human Kingdom, Ibn 'Arabi. Another real gem, this book ought to be read by every seeker on the spiritual path. If you can only find the time to read one book by Ibn 'Arabi, this ought to be the one. By turns lighthearted, serious, insightful, and ingenius, al 'Arabi introduces us to our inner government character by character, explains their relationships, and indicates how to bring them into a state of harmonious cooperation. Written with love, the book deftly manages to avoid being didactic, delivering instead a sensitive, poetic, and even romantic look at how to organize our inner Being.

The Bezels of Wisdom—Ibn al 'Arabi. A compendium of observations about the nature of "The Reality"—what al 'Arabi calls God— from a 13th century Sufi master. This towering work easily holds its own against—and is worthy of comparison to—13th century masterpieces from other major religious traditions such as Dogen's Shobogenzo and Meister Eckhart's sermons.